With major advances in various aspects of LCD technology, LCD's are being employed in many devices ranging from color cellular phone displays to most sophisticated medical equipment. For such diversity of use, different characteristics are desired. For example, durability, robustness, and the like are desirable for LCD panels to work under a wide range of circumstances such as temperature, humidity, mechanical stress, and the like.
For LCD's to be implemented in high end video applications such as large screen TV's, a capability to handle large amount of data, to provide brightness uniformity, to compensate for temperature-induced gamma gradients, and the like are desirable of the LCD circuitry. While addressing these issues, the size of the circuitry from a manufacturing cost and reliability perspective is among parameters that are taken into consideration.
A non-linear resistive (R-DAC) architecture may provide an adequate number of gray levels, for example 64 in 6-bit systems, while intrinsically correcting for gamma of the LCD. However, the R-DAC architecture results in a significant die area growth for higher grayscale precision with larger number of gray levels. For LCD applications, where higher performance is needed, the R-DAC column driver may become much larger and more expensive.
Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.